The Potent Anger of Youth

On the ground at Saturday's March for Our Lives, the anger of America's children was palpable, overwhelming, and necessary.

By
Amanda Palleschi

Mar 26, 2018

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The March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., like original Women’s March held on January 21, 2017, was heavy with pathos and impressive in scope, including hundreds of sister marches across the country and world.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with so many of your fellow citizens has become, in the Trump era, "the new brunch." The January 21, 2017 Women’s March, said to be the largest single-day protest in modern political history, was 14 months ago. But on Saturday, it felt like another era entirely. Like the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives had hype, celebrity participants, and concerns about equity and inclusion: 80 percent of kids killed by guns do not die in mass shootings; African-American children are 10 times more likely to be killed by firearms than white kids.

But where the Women’s March was a place for pink pussy hats, punny signs, and positive vibes, the March for Our Lives rally was a place for well-channeled anger, for focused defiance. If the Women’s March was a warm group hug or a prayer circle, the March for Our Lives — from where I huddled on tiptoes at 9th and Pennsylvania, anyway — was an urgent work meeting everyone resents being required to attend, but must, because their bosses aren’t getting the job done. To put it simply, the employees are fed up.

Anger — the kind that’s born when grief roils into defiance — is potent when it’s coming from our youth (as anyone who regularly interacts with teenagers surely knows). That the March for Our Lives kept its speakers largely under legal drinking (but not necessarily gun purchasing) age was its most stirring and savvy rhetorical strategy; their palpable anger was the march’s most useful tool.

Anger is potent when it’s coming from our youth.

"Are they going to arm the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney?" Parkland student Alex Wind asked the crowd, incredulous. There was his classmate, Sarah Chadwick, who’d used her speech to tell the crowd that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's donations to the NRA added up to $1.05 for every Florida student. Samantha Fuentes survived an AR-15 wound a month ago and threw up in the middle of her speech, only to keep going and lead the crowd in singing "Happy Birthday" for her friend Nick Dworet, killed in the February 14 shooting. Emma Gonzalez, with her chilling six-minute speech and minutes of silence, marked the time it took the Parkland shooter to kill 17 and injure 15. And there was the 9-year-old Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said simply, "I have a dream that enough is enough!"

A young woman makes a statement at Boston’s March For Our Lives.

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But the young King’s presence wasn’t an obligatory nod to racial justice — the march’s organizers integrated young voices from all walks of life affected by gun violence seamlessly and unselfconsciously. We listened to Zion Kelly, a high school senior from southeast Washington, D.C. whose brother was killed at gunpoint while walking home from a college prep course last year, and heard from Edna Chavez, who told the crowd that in south Los Angeles, where she lives, "It is normal to see flowers honoring the lives of black and brown youth that have lost their lives to a bullet."

While listening to 11-year-old Naomi Wadler speak, I hear a voice behind me: "Look at these Gen Z kids, they already get this whole intersectionality thing."

The voice belonged to 28-year-old D.C. resident Lina Gebremariam. She and her friend, Alex Bedroysan, 27, are among those whose bodies careen into me whenever the next overheated and fed up person makes a fruitless attempt to part the crowd.

Both attended the 2017 Women’s March. But here on this Saturday, where the sun beats down uncomfortably on those who dressed in hats and sweaters, they acknowledge, "People do seem angrier."

The March for Our Lives rally was a place for well-channeled anger, for focused defiance.

Even the signs pack a certain down-to-business punch their predecessor marches lacked. Sure, there are the clever ("TI-84>AR-15!") and the provocative ("God Hates Ammosexuals") but even more distill the message down to action: signs with lists of asks in legislation (universal background checks, bans on high capacity magazines, longer waiting periods, etc.), signs calling out politicians (Rubio is a perennial favorite), and signs alluding to the voting age of the youthful protestors and crowds ("I am a 2026 Voter and I vote for Gun Control!") are most common. After the demonstration, I stop and talk to a group of women in their 60s, who don’t want to give their last names or exact ages, and who grumble about whether politicians will listen to the demonstrators. They’re Women’s March veterans, too. What’s different about this one? "The signs there were a lot more clever," a woman named Laurie from northern Virginia says.

"Yeah! I kept a list of them!" says her friend, Shelley, from New Jersey.

"That day had a more fluid feeling," Gebremariam agrees, "but at the end of the day, you didn’t go home and do something."

And what is it, exactly, that we’ll do? The kids are counting on us to answer.

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